celebrity gossip, academic style

First things first: The Fighter is a remarkable film. At this point, I’ve seen all of the Oscar crop (save The King’s Speech, which is on deck for Wednesday): The Social Network was a tight and timely film; True Grit is hilarious and gorgeous; Black Swan is, as this great Slate article points out, “camp about camp.” But The Fighter has something that none of those other films do — a sparking, crackling sense of life. In discussing the movie with a friend who’s from the Boston area, I said that Lowell, the working class, dilapidated town where the film takes place, seemed so incredible alive. This person laughed, so I clarified: Lowell is TEEMING. Not teeming in the way that, say, Bombay is teeming — the streets aren’t packed; in fact, there’s a certain emptiness that makes it feel like the no one is ever sober or wealthy enough to drive. But there is so much presence in this film: everywhere you go (or rather, everywhere our protagonist goes), there’s his family, all seven bad-haired, bad-skinned, badly-dressed sisters, plus his hurricane of a mother and leech of a brother, plus every other person in town who’s ever known him or a member of his family, all that weight of presence, weighing down. It’s a tremendous pressure, and you see it in the way that even an incredible physical presence like Wahlberg seems to cower, just ever so slightly, each time he walks in his house or the local restaurant

Just a few of the seven sisters....

The director is David O. Russell, best known for Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, and inspiring incredible rants from George Clooney and Lily Tomlin on-set. This guy is no Altman; actors do not “love” working with him. Unless they’re Mark Wahlberg, who has given some of the best performances of his career for Russell (probably my favorite Wahlberg moment: ‘You rock, rock!’) Despite speculation that the now-notoriously difficult Bale would go head-to-head with Russell, it was in fact Wahlberg and Bale who collectively decided on Russell after Darren Aronofsky dropped out (he decided that the film was too much like his other film about fighting). I’ve loved Russell’s previous movies, but this one might be the most complete: in The Fighter, there’s a deftness to Russell’s direction, which seems to move seamlessly from complete pathos to hilarity. The comparisons between the seven bombastic sisters and a Greek chorus are not without warrant; don’t let the bad early ’90s fashions fool you into thinking this story isn’t archetypal. Russell excels at taking basic tropes of classic family melodrama and effortlessly draping the specifics of a time, place, and personal narrative over them. And the opening sequence — credits and the shots immediately following — is an absolute wonder to behold. I only wish I could post it.

In lieu of the opening sequence, you'll have to settle for a shot of Melissa Leo's excellent hair.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: the purpose of this post is to tease out how the star images of the two stars of the film — Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale — influence the way that we read the film, their characters, and their performances. So if you haven’t heard of the film, you’ll find the preview below:

Now, if I were really doing this right, I’d also talk about the performances of Melissa Leo (the matriarch - you may recognize her from her amazing turn in Frozen River, or maybe as John Goodman’s wife in Treme) and Amy Adams, who demonstrates what a filthy mouth really sounds like, and what sexiness can look like outside of the pilates studio. They’re both spectacular. As are the seven women portraying Wahlberg and Bale’s sisters — I grew up in a working class town in the ’80s and early ’90s, readers, and that is indeed what the hair, bodysuits, and jean skirts looked like.

Amy Adams has some excellent scrunchies in this film.

So Wahlberg plays Mickey — a boxer on the ascendency, the family’s new hope. His older half-brother, Dicky (Bale), had his moment of glory — he was in the ring with Sugar Ray, and brags of knocking him down (in reality, Sugar Ray tripped, but that fact figures little into the lore). Now Dicky’s a crack-head, but in the way of all charismatic older brothers, has taught Mickey everything he knows, and despite his complete f-ed-up-ness, Mickey finds it difficult to live with him or without him. Same goes for his overbearing, tough loving mother, who refuses to admit to herself what Dicky has become. AND YOU GUYS, THIS IS A REAL STORY. If you were into boxing twenty years ago, you’ve heard the name Mickey Ward and know (at least part) of his story. The Fighter is basically the creation story of Mickey, because the movie ends just when the real Mickey embarks on his path towards glory.

Enough set-up: let’s talk performance.

Bale as Dicky Eklund

CHRISTIAN BALE AS DICKY:

Dicky is a crack-head, and Bale, being Bale, took up the challenge of transforming into one with relish. His teeth are disgusting; his body is emaciated (though not nearly as much as in The Machinist, when Bale was down to 120 pounds). The skin on his face has the tight, stretched, near-translucent looks of a corpse, his cheeks and eye sockets are hollowed. He’s a tattered ghost of the beautiful, refined Bale of Little Women or Batman. But Bale’s skill is evident in his ability to make Eckland’s charisma tangible: you’re simultaneously revolted and attracted this guy. Not sexually attracted, per se — I mean, there’s only so much a personality can compensate for — but you can see the spell he puts on people, and why they want to believe what he promises. This sort of warmth and magnetism was absolutely necessary to create a character as nuanced as Dicky, and Bale just NAILS it. Manohla Dargis agrees — on Sunday, she wrote a piece that basically functions as a soliloquy to Bale’s performance. She performs a masterful close read of his performance in a single scene in the first act of the film, part of which I’ve excerpted below — [my apologies; this might not make complete sense if you've yet to see the film] -

Dicky’s crack-house braggadocio comes to a climax with Boo Boo hitting the ground as if from a blow, the moment intercut with the 1978 fight. Mr. Russell crops the real bout so you can’t see that Mr. Leonard tripped, a cheat that preserves Dicky’s misremembered triumph. He thrusts his arms in the air and again steps over a fallen man. A few cuts later Dicky is bending into the frame toward his reward, the camera following him as he — and the shot — lean toward a waiting crack pipe. But just before he draws in the smoke, Mr. Bale does something extraordinary: He drains the animation from his face and turns his buggy eyes into fathomless pits, revealing the death mask beneath Dicky’s wild pantomime of life.

In one minute of screen time Mr. Bale, ably assisted by his director, the cinematographer and editor, has replayed the entire tragic sweep of Dicky’s life, with its bruising knockdown fights and addictively crippling highs. Right then someone reminds Dicky that he’s supposed to be training Micky at the gym. The camera swoops in for a close-up of Dicky’s comically startled face as he yells “What?,” the tight, drumlike skin punctuated by the dark O of his mouth. And then Dicky is off and running down Lowell’s brightly sunny mean streets. As his loose arms and legs spin in circles, he looks a little like the Road Runner, though more like a fugitive clown. He’s a riot, that Dicky, and he’s running for his life.

Now, Bale is obviously nothing like Dicky. Right? In truth, we don’t *actually* know — Bale is fiercely private. He has no desire to talk about his private life; he is openly combative in interviews, acknowledging that he’s only doing them because his contract obliges him to do so. We know that he’s married, that he has a daughter, that he apparently has a temper, and that something weird happened last year when his mother and sister filed a complaint of abuse against him (which was later rescinded). We know that he started acting early — in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun — and even then hated promoting. [Wikipedia also tells me that Bale's father married Gloria Steinham late in life, making Bale the step-son to one of the leading figures of second wave feminism. CRAZY.]

As I thought about Bale and previous roles, I realized that he’s been in tons of films I love — Little Women, Newsies, The New World (boy oh boy does he make me cry there), The Prestige, the first Batman (the scene when he goes from standing up and falls into the push-up gets me every time, and no, I don’t like The Dark Knight; it’s fascist, but that’s for another blog post), Rescue Dawn, Laurel Canyon, 3:10 to Yuma, Velvet Goldmine, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Portrait of a Lady…..But never playing any specific type. The point is underscored by his performance in two movies that viscerally repulsed me — American Psycho and The Machinist. He can be straight-laced, he can be dominant, he can be weak, he can be fiercely masculine, he can be queer, he can be hateable, he can be pitiable. He can play almost anything; and, starting with The Machinist and the subsequent transformation into Batman, it became clear that he was willing to sacrifice his body to the role. Bale claims not to be a Method actor — he claims he doesn’t use experiences from his own life to inform his performance — but he certainly transforms himself utterly, staying in character throughout the duration of filming. (Here, it’s interesting to note that the rant on the set of Terminator was performed the American accent of his character — was he just acting as John Connor would?)

Bale is also cognizant that his ability to believably play such a spectrum of characters is contingent on his ability to keep knowledge about his personal life to a minimum. In a characteristically reluctant interview with the New York Times, Bale makes it clear that he’s an actor, not a star:

Mr. Bale’s views on artistic privacy are related to his faith, perhaps a naïve one, that an anonymous actor is a more credible shape shifter. “I like the idea of movies having a magic element,” he said. “How many times have you seen an actor in a movie who you know only as the character? It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

To the extent that Mr. Bale can approximate a blank slate in his films, he said, it is because he is an actor, not a movie star. He guards his personal life — he and his wife of 10 years, Sibi Blazic, have a 5-year-old daughter — and save for the “Terminator” blow-up and allegations of verbal assault on his mother and sister in 2008 (the charges were dropped), he has not gotten much tabloid attention. “A movie star is someone people look at and go, ‘I want to be like that person,’ ” Mr. Bale said. “There’s the responsibility of desire. It’s not something I’m interested in trying. I would fail miserably at it, so why even bother?”

In his hilariously combative interview with Esquire from last month, Bale cites Steve McQueen as a sort of ultimate movie star — you see him in a movie and you say “I want to be Steve McQueen,” not “I want to be [insert character's name here].”

Bale may not have a complete star image — the outburst and the weird incident with his family seem to reveal some sort of authentic self, but they’re the only real windows we have into his personal life. But does he even have a consistent picture personality? Put differently, is there a line we can trace from role to role? Like most Method actors, Bale’s picture personality is not of a certain type, but of the “serious method actor.” Like (the younger) De Niro or Daniel Day-Lewis, his picture personality is rooted in the fact that he consistently plays wildly divergent characters — it’s the non-picture personality, and that non-ness is as much of defining characteristic as any other type. Does that make sense?

Dicky in action...

It’s this non-picture personality, this non-star image, that makes it possible for Bale to play Dicky. While I still think that all of the incessant talk about Bale’s performance is somewhat exhausting (especially coming from those Nolan-ites who worship him simply for his involvement in the Batman franchise), any other star in this role would be distracting. Every move would be a reminder of the fact that this star was DOING SOME SERIOUS ACTING. Brad Pitt was originally slated for the role — can you imagine it? I would just be thinking “Whoa, Brad Pitt sure looks bad” the entire film. With a star in the role, the star’s image would envelop that of Dicky; with Bale, Dicky envelops him. (For proof, watch clips of the real Dicky in the HBO doc on his crack abuse — it’s startling).

In contrast…..

Mark Wahlberg as Mickey Ward

MARK WAHLBERG AS MICKEY:

Dargis puts a fine point on the contrast between the two performances:

With his naturalistic delivery and relaxed animal physicality Mr. Wahlberg doesn’t seem to be acting, while a twitchy, jumpy Mr. Bale all but pinwheels off the screen. Mr. Wahlberg’s acting seems more a matter of being, while Mr. Bale’s appears self-consciously performed. Each explores a life lived on and off the stage of the ring, but in Mr. Bale’s deep-tissue turn as an addict, the tragedy of a life is wholly embodied.

Dargis obviously thinks more of Bale’s “deep-tissue” performance — and I understand why. Wahlberg’s performance isn’t as flashy or memorable; as Dargis says, “it’s more a matter of being.” In many ways, he seems to be playing himself - a slightly modified version of “Mark Wahlberg,” who shows up in each of his roles. It’s true: Wahlberg does have a unified star image, buttressed by a consistent picture personality. He plays physically strong men whose exteriors bely a deep intelligence — they’re not necessarily book smart, but they understand the way that the world works, the way people work, and the slight slump to the shoulders keys us into the fact that they realize the world’s a pretty tragic place. But Wahlberg is also somewhat deliriously funny — madcap in I Heart Huckabees, playing the straight man in The Other Guys, making fun of himself on Saturday Night Live. When he showed up SNL, it was in response to Andy Samberg’s spot-on imitation, “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals,” which you can see below:

Like all great imitations, Samberg’s succeeds by touching on the hallmarks of Wahlberg’s image: the lilt of the voice (betraying his working class Boston upbringing), the confrontational tone, the conciliatory ”say hi to your mother for me,” the evocation of his producing role on Entourage — a show modeled after Wahlberg’s own experience in Hollywood after rising to stardom.

But it misses some of the finer points of the Wahlberg image, and part of what makes this particular role — and Wahlberg’s “playing himself” — so impressive:

In press reports, The Fighter is repeatedly evoked as Mark Wahlberg’s “passion project.” He went through multiple directors, co-stars, producers and funding sources; he trained for four years, transforming his basement into a boxing gym and hiring Mickey’s own trainer; he spent countless hours at Mickey and Dicky’s Lowell gym. His passion for the film stems from his childhood fascination with Mickey’s story — like Mickey, Wahlberg comes from an Irish-Catholic family of 9; like Mickey, Wahlberg grew up working class on the outskirts of Boston. Wahlberg was the baby of the family, and found himself fighting his siblings throughout his childhood. Wahlberg also got in trouble early, landing in jail for several months before finally turning his life around — a decision he attributes to the guidance of a Priest — in his late teens. At this point, Wahlberg’s older brother Donny had already made it big as a member of The New Kids on the Block; Mark was hoping to follow in his older brother’s proven footsteps. (AGAIN: SIMILARITIES ARE OBVIOUS). Mark Wahlberg became “Marky Mark” and released an album, produced by Donny, featuring the wedding-reception-classic “Good Vibrations.” Again, see below.

And then, oh, then, the Calvin Klein ads. Combined with the ubiquitous Good Vibrations, Marky Mark had made it.

These posters were a HUGE DEAL. People stole them from the streets, the subways, from bus shelters. I can’t think of another advertising phenomenon that did so much to establish a star — even if Marky Mark was still just a rapper at this point. This is also when the Entourage-style life supposedly began — Wahlberg didn’t have a huge movie role like Vince Chance does in the series, but he did bring his best friends to come live with him in Los Angeles; shenanigans and much womanizing ensued. According to Wahlberg, he had no notion of acting, but Penny Marshall called him up during casting for Renaissance Man. According to Wahlberg,

“And when I sat down with her, I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t wanna act.’ She goes, ‘What do you mean? You’re acting all the time, you’re acting right now. You know, you’re just acting like you’re cool, you act like a tough guy. You know, take the pages. Go outside, look ‘em over, and then come back in, and, and audition for one of the parts.”

Wahlberg got the part, and when on to other tough guy teen parts, perhaps most famously in Fear (with Reese Witherspoon) — a movie that had a profound impact on me and other girls of my age. [All I need to say is ROLLER COASTER. Maybe also "Nichole 4-Evuh."

But the Fear picture personality wasn't a great fit -- there's something about Wahlberg that seems gentler and more tenderhearted....which might be why his turn in Boogie Nights was such a revelation. Wahlberg followed Boogie Nights with Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, The Italian Job, Four Brothers, I Heart Huckabees, The Departed, plus less memorable, even laughable roles in Planet of the Apes, Rock Star, Shooter, Invincible, and Max Payne. And I'm still missing about a dozen roles: this guy WORKS.

Wahlberg isn't super guarded about his private life, but he's no gossip column favorite -- at least not of late. Back in the day, he sewed some wild oats; one of his flings, Rhea Durham, gave birth to his child, they broke up, she gave birth to another child, they got back together, they had another kid, and finally, in 2009, they got married; they now have four children together. (See Lainey Gossip for the inside dish on how Durham may or may not have ensnared Wahlberg). Despite his proclivities with the ladies, Wahlberg is a devout Catholic, and regularly attends Mass. He hangs out with his kids; indeed, he first met Bale because both of their kids attended the same preschool.

The laundry list of personal details and gratuitous underwear shots proves it: Wahlberg's personal life complements his picture personality rather perfectly. He's a ladies man -- see, for example, his brilliant spoof of himself in Date Night -- but he's a man of integrity. His early self might have been bombastic and prideful, but as he ages, it's turned in on itself, making him a man of intense yet quiet physical presence. He's a family man, but has always wanted something better for himself and his family. And just look at his face in the Calvin Klein ad -- there's a sense of joy there, even as the state of his abs betray his intense work ethic.

Wahlberg does seem to just be Mickey; the man he's portraying seems so familiar to the image we associate with the man himself. But does that make it any less acting? Or does that mean that Wahlberg simply found the role that perfectly fit his established set of attributes? Because here's the kicker: Mickey couldn't have been played by someone who seemed to be acting or putting on a show. That was Dicky's schtick, not Mickey's. Mickey was the second son, the one who faded into the background, who observed while his cartwheel of a brother stole the show, not only in the boxing ring, but in whatever space he happened to be. While Dickey acts -- always in motion, always provoking, always sparking a new conversation -- Mickey REacts. That's what we're meant to take away from this movie, and without it, the Dicky's transformation in the third act -- and the selflessness he shows towards his brother in the final training sessions and fights -- would not be nearly as touching.

This movie would not work without an actor like Bale as Dicky.....and a reactor -- a solid star image, someone like Wahlberg -- as Mickey. The correlations between Wahlberg and Mickey's life are just icing on the cake, encouraging us to think of the performance -- and the entirety of the narrative -- as authentic. In the end, it's perfect casting for a near-perfect film.

[Have you seen The Fighter? What did you think? ]